The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  She carried mugs of coffee into a narrow conservatory coated in peeling whitewash. ‘I’m glad to see you still paint,’ said May. ‘I’ve been looking out for exhibitions featuring your work.’

  ‘You won’t have found any,’ she warned, pulling the cloth from a large canvas. ‘I’m off the radar of popularity these days. I switched from figurative stuff to rather fierce abstracts; I think you often do as you mature and become interested in states of mind rather than accurate depictions of people and buildings.’

  May examined the painting, an arrangement of curling cerulean lines that drifted to a dark horizon. ‘I like that. Is it sold?’

  She blew an errant lock of hair from her eye. ‘Please don’t humour me, John. There have been no takers so far. I’ll let you have it if you can sort out this problem with Gareth. I’m glad you’re still in the force.’

  ‘That’s just it, I’m not really. The unit has been separated from the Met, but we still handle cases in the public domain.’

  ‘Whatever happened to that funny little man who was rude to everyone?’ she asked. ‘The one with the foul-smelling pipe?’

  ‘Arthur’s very well, touch wood,’ said May apologetically. ‘I’m still partnered with him.’

  ‘You two have lasted longer than most marriages. Doesn’t he drive you mad?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t tell any more. Do you still call yourself Mona?’

  ‘God no, nobody’s called me that in years. Gareth hates contractions. I had to become respectable in every way when I married an academic. All those formal dinners with elderly men. Tell them you paint and they look at you with condescension, another bored housewife looking for hobbies to fill the evenings while her husband is working on something important. I lost my husband to them after he made his mistake about that bloody statue, the Nereid. He needed to regain their respect, and they made a pact with him; they would allow him back into their exalted circle if he devoted all his time to their various causes. So Gareth behaved himself, joined the right committees and worked late every night, and we were grudgingly re-admitted.’

  ‘If things got back to normal, why do you think he’s in trouble again now?’

  ‘We’re short of money, of course. I’m not allowed to work, so we survive on his pitiful salary. But I think it’s more than that. This “client” has appealed to his vanity by insisting that no one but Gareth can work for him. He’s the best in the field, there’s nobody else who could handle the job, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to make some real money, etcetera. You should see him when he comes off the phone, as excited as a schoolboy.’

  ‘What made you think he was planning something illegal?’

  ‘He won’t talk about what he’s been asked to do, and I know what he’s like. He thinks that if I find out, I’ll have a go at him for being so stupid.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Do you still smoke?’

  ‘No, I gave up years ago—doctor’s orders.’

  ‘Any idea what he’s up to?’

  ‘I can tell you a little,’ May admitted. ‘He’s exploring the remains of London’s lost rivers. We’ve tracked him at the sites of three so far—the Fleet, the Effra and the Walbrook. He seems particularly interested in the point where their tunnels widen and open to the Thames.’

  ‘Why? I know it’s his area of expertise, but surely that sort of exploration is all above board.’

  ‘We checked out the most obvious reasons. I thought the various councils involved might have failed to grant access, but no requests to explore closed sections of the rivers have been received at all. Thames Water occasionally issues permits for non-professionals to enter the system with a team, but they’ve told us they know nothing about this. Besides, the recent rainfall has made conditions so hazardous that only experienced workers are entering for essential repairs. The rivers run through and under various parcels of private property, so we’ve made discreet inquiries with landlords and developers. But we’ve turned up nothing there, either. Which means that your husband is acting without permission, on behalf of a private client. He’s been photographed at all of these sites.’

  ‘You’re talking about breaking and entering, trespass at the very least. It’ll get back to the museum, these things always do. He’ll be thrown out again. Can’t you do something to stop him?’

  ‘Arthur wants to find out what he’s up to. The idea is to step in before he commits himself to anything serious, and hopefully avoid the trespass charge by getting something on his client.’

  Monica ran a hand through her hair. ‘I can’t take much more of this life, John. I’m not very good at being a sidekick. I don’t want to just be supportive. I was seriously thinking of leaving him when this came along, like some kind of a test. I know it wasn’t fair to involve you, but I didn’t have anyone else to turn to. The academic wives don’t want anything to do with me, and my old friends have all moved on. I thought you might remember me fondly.’

  May smiled. ‘You know how I felt about you.’

  ‘Then why did you let me go?’

  ‘What can I say?’ The subject embarrassed him even now. ‘They were the disco years. Nobody acted their age, nobody settled down.’

  ‘That’s the lamest excuse I ever heard.’ Her laugh was unchanged. ‘You were married when I met you. What happened?’

  ‘Oh, it was all a long time ago,’ said May evasively as he rose and examined the canvases.

  ‘So it didn’t last.’

  ‘No, Jane and I divorced. She was—there were health problems. She became ill. Not physically, you understand, just—’ He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He saw little point in resurrecting the past, at least not while the pain of those years remained.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, John.’

  ‘That’s just the problem—I haven’t talked about it in a long while. I rarely discuss my marriage with Arthur because—well, he has very particular views on these things.’

  ‘You’re talking about mental illness, aren’t you?’

  ‘We didn’t know what we were dealing with back then.’

  ‘But you had children.’

  ‘Yes, two. Alex was born first, then Elizabeth came along four years later. Now there’s only Alex.’

  Monica rose and came to his side, resting her hand lightly on his shoulder. ‘What happened to your daughter?’

  He turned aside, barely able to voice his thoughts. ‘She died, and it was my fault. I was more ambitious in those days, perhaps too much so. Alex is married and lives in Canada now, but wants nothing to do with me. Elizabeth—she gave birth to a baby girl. April reminds me so much of her mother. She lives here in London, and will be fine one day soon, I’m sure. She still has problems, but we’re learning to overcome them.’

  ‘Poor John, you haven’t had the things you deserve.’

  He tried to make light of it. ‘I don’t know, I suppose it’s still better to have raised a family than to be like Arthur, even if I eventually lost it.’

  ‘You never lost me,’ said Monica, raising her hands to his face.

  ‘You’re telling me you slept with her? Somebody from our own neighbourhood?’ Kayla Ayson yelled.

  ‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’ Randall shouted back. The front bedroom of number 39 was small, and Randall was sure that the neighbours could hear every word. ‘What does it matter anyway? It was two years before I met you.’

  ‘Then why wait until now to tell me? Wait a minute.’ Kayla raised a hand to her forehead. ‘You were the one who liked this house so much, even though I thought it was too small for the children. Did you do that just so you could be near her again? Are you still seeing her? Christ, she came to the Wiltons’ party. You call yourself a decent Christian but you still want her.’

  ‘Will you listen to yourself? Of course I don’t, I’m telling you because it’s bound to come out sooner or later. I didn’t even know she lived in this street until I saw her that evening. She came over and spoke to me when I went t
o get a drink in the kitchen. What could I do?’

  ‘You could have told her that you’re happily married.’

  ‘Of course I did that, but she’s the kind of woman—I just thought you should know.’

  ‘She’s probably told half the neighbourhood. How do you think that makes me feel, knowing that they’re laughing behind my back?’

  ‘I wanted to be honest with you,’ Randall pleaded. ‘I wish I hadn’t told you.’

  ‘Was she married? Did you commit the sin of adultery?’

  ‘No, she was single, working in a plant nursery in Camden. I was just as shocked to see her as she was me. And she won’t have told anyone, it would only cause more trouble.’

  ‘But you had to tell me. And now she lives with that awful estate agent in the house opposite. What a convenient coincidence.’

  ‘We had a few dates, Kayla, that’s all. Lauren means nothing to me. Do you think I’d have told you about her if she did?’

  Behind them, their daughter began to cry, awoken by the discordance in the house. Randall stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind him, leaving his wife in anguish and bewilderment.

  Kallie had never been prone to tears, but she found it hard to stop them now.

  ‘I have to do it, Kal. They’re not going to pay me a penny more. I don’t have a job. I don’t have any savings. I can’t get work here. What else can I do?’ Paul was pacing before her in his unravelling turquoise sweater, more angry and confused than she’d ever seen him.

  ‘There must be something. What about Neil, doesn’t he have any connections?’

  ‘He sells vases and candle-holders to retailers, for God’s sake. Even if he could find me something, how long do you think I’d last? I’ve always been in the music business. I survived the price-fixing scandals, the Britpop explosion, I made it through hip-hop and the boy bands, but the only growth area is acoustic stuff and I know nothing about that.’

  ‘Couldn’t you learn?’

  ‘I detest acoustic sets. I don’t want to earn a living doing something I hate. I know it’s selfish, but if I don’t take the chance now, I’ll always be thinking about what might have been. You’re covered, you’ve got this house and your modelling work, your friends, all your other interests. Besides, it may turn out to be good for both of us. It’s not going to be for ever.’

  He wanted to take off. Paul had already decided to fulfil his dream and travel around the world. He explained he would be back in six months, nine at the most. Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Prague, Greece, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan—he had already described the itinerary in detail. She wondered how long the idea had been forming in his head. She wanted to argue that he was running away from his problems, that if he couldn’t make it here and now, building a new home with her, then she was not about to wait around for him. But the words dried in her mouth.

  ‘I could go with you.’ She hadn’t meant to suggest it, because she knew what he would say.

  ‘I’ll be doing bar and DJ work to pay my way. What would you do? You’re happy in your own home, it’s what you always wanted.’

  She had promised herself that she would discuss the matter rationally, but now a crackling cloud of panic settled on her. ‘I don’t know. There’s something wrong here and I don’t understand—while you were away I became so nervous, it’s not like me, I kept hearing water, and it felt as though someone had been in the house behind my back, my stuff was moved around—’

  ‘You’re just over-sensitive to the fact that the old lady died here, Kal. And there are pipes running under the bathroom floor. How do you think the water drains away?’

  ‘There was that awful thing, the crayfish, in the garden. It’s like we’re living at the coast instead of being in the centre of town.’

  ‘But you love it, and I know you’ll settle. You took a year off and got the travel bug out of your system. Can’t you see how unhappy I am? If I wait any longer, I’ll grow old and die under these fucking grey skies without ever having experienced the world.’ He untangled her reluctant hands from his. ‘I have to, Kal, this place is killing what we have. I don’t feel at home here. I have to go.’

  She found it hard to believe this was the same man who had said he would never leave. Something deep within him had changed. Paul’s determination to be free of her finally made her cry. She sobbed because now there was no going back to what they had shared, because he had not answered his mobile, and because she had seen the faint crescent of the lovebite on his neck.

  18

  * * *

  THE HOUSE IN BRICK LANE

  Arthur Bryant wedged his crowbar under the lid of the mildewed pine storage crate and prised it off, scattering rusty nails all over the floor of the office at Mornington Crescent. The box had been kept under a railway arch in a lock-up at King’s Cross, but construction companies were tearing down the arches, and he had been forced to find a new home for his collection. It had been May’s idea to bring his partner’s memorabilia into the unit, because he felt sorry that Bryant had lost so much in the blaze, even though it had been his own fault.

  Bryant knew that he was being provided with a displacement activity, something to quell his overactive imagination until Raymond Land sanctioned a new case. Inside the musty container were relics of his greatest successes. He carefully eased out Rothschild, his mange-riddled Abyssinian cat, and set it on the shelf above his desk. He had replaced its missing eyes with a pair of coloured marbles, but there was no substitute for the back leg that had fallen off some years ago. The stuffed feline had once been the familiar of Edna Wagstaff, the renowned Deptford medium, who had now sadly passed to the Other Side herself, to join Squadron Leader Smethwick and Evening Echo, her informants from beyond. Most of Bryant’s books had been destroyed in the fire, but reaching into the box he was pleased to discover battered copies of Malleus Maleficarum, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (first edition), Mayhew’s London Characters and Crooks, J. R. Hanslet’s All of Them Witches, Deitleff’s Psychic Experience in the Weimar Republic, Fifty Thrifty Cheese Recipes and Brackleson’s Stoat-Breeding for Intermediates. Further down were items that stirred long-dormant memories: a programme from the Palace Theatre for Orphée aux Enfers, the scene of their first case; the claw of a Bengal tiger found pacing about a west London bedroom; a monarch butterfly that had acted as a vital clue in stemming a Soho drug epidemic; a runic alphabet used to solve a bizarre suicide in the city. He had begun to write up each case as a chapter in the unit’s memoirs, and knowing that they could not be published in his lifetime, made them as scurrilous and slander-packed as possible, a cathartic exercise that temporarily expunged the bitterness he felt at being held back by idiots.

  As happy as a child in a dressing-up box, he fished out each item and carefully wiped it, looking at his shelves with pride. Satisfied that he had made the room homelier, he took down his copy of The Luddite’s Guide to the Internet and decided to tackle May’s new Macintosh laptop.

  Half an hour later, May arrived and noticed that the building had become ominously quiet. He went to check on his partner.

  ‘Ah, there you are. What do you know about Hot Dutch Interspecies Love?’ Bryant looked up from the computer. ‘Specifically, how to get rid of it?’

  ‘What have you done?’ asked May, dreading the answer. ‘You know you’re never supposed to touch my things.’ He cleared a patch in the chaotic landscape of Bryant’s spreading paperwork to set down his Starbucks cup. The last time Bryant had accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.

  ‘I was trying to find the address of the Amsterdam Spiritualist Society. I had to give these people my credit details for some reason, and then the screen filled up with the most disgusting pictures of ladies in barnyards. When I tried to cancel my American Express card, I som
ehow went through to the Parker Meridien Hotel in New York, specifically their internal telephone system. I followed the recorded instructions about entering a code, then everything went dead and a man started threatening me with a lawsuit. He says I’ve crashed their switchboard, and now all these horrible animal pictures are popping up again. I hope I haven’t broken the Internet.’

  ‘Don’t ever give anyone your credit-card details.’ John turned the keyboard around and began closing his files. ‘You just have to accept that there are some things you shouldn’t attempt. Let me do it for you.’

  ‘I think I caused electrical interference somehow. I didn’t want to bother you.’ Some aspects of Bryant’s ageing process had begun to mutate into characteristics more commonly associated with troublesome babies.

  ‘It bothers me a lot more when your experiments in the digital domain start to produce global effects. I don’t want you messing around with my laptop. It’s bad enough that I can’t receive email at home any more.’ Bryant had somehow managed to get his partner blacklisted by every server in the country. May had explained the principles of the Internet dozens of times, but always ended up being sidetracked into the kind of arcane discussions Bryant enjoyed having, like how the Macintosh apple symbol represented Alan Turing’s method of suicide, or how Karl Marx had once run up Tottenham Court Road (where May purchased his computer equipment) drunkenly smashing streetlamps.

  ‘What are you still doing here, anyway?’ May asked. The division’s promised casework had been delayed pending the arrival of new equipment that had so far failed to materialize. Wyman, the mistily evasive Home Office liaison officer, was full of excuses. At a time when terrorist splinter groups had been caught attempting to blast London targets with American-made Stinger missiles, tentatively experimental divisions like the Peculiar Crimes Unit were the first to feel the financial pinch.

  Bryant thrust his hands into his pockets and swung around on his swivel chair. ‘My legs are killing me tonight, so to take my mind off them I thought I’d go through the Permanently Open files, see if there’d been any recent sightings of the Leicester Square Vampire.’